[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Moving various packages/codecs to tainted

Anssi Hannula anssi at mageia.org
Wed Jan 11 13:56:32 CET 2012


On 10.01.2012 15:07, Pascal Terjan wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 03:20, Anssi Hannula <anssi at mageia.org> wrote:
>> The problem is that that "balance" was achieved by sticking packages in
>> PLF/main/contrib semi-randomly. For example, H.264 decoders and MPEG-4
>> video encoders are in main/core, while e.g. AAC audio decoders are in
>> PLF/tainted. If one'd put them into an order, IMO H.264 and MPEG-4 would
>> be much more prominent and tainted candidates instead of AAC decoding...
>> Also, in e.g. MPEG-4 case we have encoders both in core and in tainted,
>> e.g. we have ffmpeg in core, but xvid in tainted.
> 
> I agree we need rules, but "being covered with patents" does not make
> sense, as the patent owner may agree with using it in free software.
> I think something like "No actively enforced patent" in core would be good.

Possibly, but how do you define that, exactly?

Does a licensing program count as "enforcing" or do you mean something else?

>>> I suppose you can't blame a
>>> US company like RedHat for being overly paranoid, but as you said, Mandriva hasn't had any problems.  Are there any there examples out of
>>> there of distros trying to achieve this balance?  Obviously we don't want to follow Ubuntu or ROSA in pretending patents don't exist.
>>
>> Linux Mint provides a "No codecs" CD:
>> http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
>>
>> Ubuntu has a patent policy (which basically IIRC says "rights owner or
>> packager, please contact us if you think there is an infringement, we
>> will investgate"):
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PatentPolicy
>>
>> Note also that the Ubuntu Live CD and therefore the default Ubuntu
>> installation do not contain any codecs. By default Totem is installed,
>> however, and gstreamer is plugged into "gnome-codec-install" (which
>> seems really nice, do we use it?), so that wen you try to play an
>> unsupported video the first time, it will prompt to install the codecs
>> (it will also show a warning dialog about patents etc, but AFAICS this
>> comes from gnome-codec-install itself, not Ubuntu).
> 
> This looks nice
> 


-- 
Anssi Hannula


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